This thread is v interesting. Firstly, I find the name of it pretty ordinary, and full of generalisation. I am assuming that by the term "megaswill" that Sponge (and others who have replied) implies adjunct lagers.
Adjunct lagers are a style of beer all by themselves, and need to be appreciated as such. The Australian International Beer Awards defines the style "Australian Lager" as follows:
"Australian Style Lagers have low to medium hop bitterness. Hop taste and aroma, if present, should be of low to medium intensity. They are light in colour (less than 15 EBC) and fruity esters (if present) should be low to medium. They have low to medium body, a clean crisp flavour and medium to high carbonation. There should be no diacetyl and no chill haze. Low levels of DMS can be present in pale lagers. Residual malt/sugar sweetness should be low."
When you get a good fresh one, it is a great beer, and I would be happy to drink them in multiples of six. They are all about the careful and subtle integration of ingredients, as are American beers - not very easy beers to brew, and there are a lot of very intelligent people working diligently on their production, with massive R & D budgets. My point - for what they aspire to be, Australian lagers are beers of good quality, and certainly no worse than macrobrewed beers of other nations.
What do you mean by "just so crap"? I think that as brewers we need to avoid such generalisations and actually define the fault, whether it is acetaldehyde, diacetyl, oxidisation or whatever. I don't think any of us, as brewers, would like our beer simply branded as "crap" without further qualification.
Incidentally, I work for a micro, and I often taste our beer out in trade on draught, and it is occasionally quite unrecognisable from the state that it leaves the brewery in. There is some very scary stuff that grows in beer lines out there , and there is little that we can do to control it. We once had a customer accuse us of sending out faulty beer, but when questioned about his cleaning regime, he admitted that his lines hadn't been cleaned with appropriate chemicals for 4-5 months - this is a guy who specialised in serving live beers (which makes it far worse), and took pride in his beer selection. I don't want to think about the average publican who couldn't care about his lines at all.
I was talking to a Dutch bar manager who told me that where he's from, the lines are checked regularly by the food safety people, to ensure good cleaning happens regularly. I think that this is something that K Rudd overlooked in his election campaign - funding for beer line police. You could probably even get a volunteer brigade together.
We, as consumers and producers are at the mercy of publicans. We all understand the fragile nature of beer, and it doesn't take much to ruin a good beer.
